Time Honored Non-Specifics

Time-Honored Non-Specifics spotlights the School of Art MFA program from the school where Andy Warhol earned his degree in pictorial design in 1949 (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University).

The thesis exhibition features new work by Naomi Chambers, Bulumko Mbete, and Afrooz Partovi, whose studio-based practices span painting, assemblage sculpture, textiles, ceramics, installation, immersive technologies, and time-based media. In its second year at The Warhol, the exhibition also continues a growing partnership between the museum and CMU, bringing these artists into the legacy of Andy Warhol, one of the School of Art’s most influential alumni.

The exhibition title speaks to the three artists’ shared, though distinctly interpreted, relationships to time, traditions, and meaning. Chambers, a Pittsburgh-born painter and assemblage sculptor, roots her work in community histories and Black feminist modes of care, and her practice reflects years of collaboration, mentorship and collective organizing. Mbete, a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa, draws from textile traditions and craft methodologies practiced by women in Southern Africa, engaging them as living archives of generational knowledge and contemporary realities. Partovi, an artist-architect from Iran, explores absence, disappearance, and the porous boundaries between physical and digital space, using immersive technologies to surface overlooked histories and intangible forms of memory. Together, their thesis work culminates in an exhibition grounded in three years of intensive critical inquiry within the CMU MFA program.

The Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA Program is an interdisciplinary, experimental, research-based program that provides students with a challenging and supportive context to expand and develop their work and thinking as artists. As one of the top-ranked graduate programs in the country, the school views artmaking as a vital social, critical, and intellectual pursuit. Graduate students are encouraged to employ a comparative and intersectional approach to critical and cultural theories, and to allow this inquiry to inform and expand what it means to be an artist and to make art within the contemporary condition.